


What's Best For Them

by Hekate1308



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, slight spoilers for episode 3x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:23:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hekate1308/pseuds/Hekate1308
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't that she didn't love her sons the way they were. She simply thought it would be good for them to make a few friends. Mrs. and Mr.Holmes' attempts to make Sherlock and Mycroft interact with other children. Spoilers for 3x01.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's Best For Them

It wasn‘t that she didn’t love her sons the way they were.

She simply thought it would be good for them to make a few friends. They had been isolated far too long already.

Sherlock was seven and Mycroft was fourteen years old, and they were both highly intelligent, but lacked any desire to interact with people. Mycroft especially; sometimes she wondered if her elder son lived in a World of his own, a World were nothing but his mind seemed to matter. He barely even talked to her and Siger; he didn’t play in the garden; he was content to read his books for hours, never once looking up.

She would have been worried, if it hadn’t been for Sherlock.

The age gap between them was somewhat larger than average, seven years, and as a matter of fact, her and Siger had already been resigned to the fact that Mycroft would stay an only child when Sherlock had happened. Her son had at first been hesitant at the idea of being an older brother, to have to share his parents and house with a toddler, as he had explained with all the dignity he could muster at his young age, but once Sherlock had been born –

Mycroft had been hesitant to show his affection for his brother, even when only seven years old, but that hadn’t stopped him from checking on the baby at least three times day and watching with curious eyes when Violet fed him.

And the brothers were close, she didn’t doubt it.

Whenever Sherlock did one of his experiments (which she wasn’t allowed to call “cute”), he showed them to Mycroft. He imitated his older brother’s gestures – for example the prayer position he would sometimes get into when he was thinking – and Mycroft was teaching him how to do “deductions”.

She wasn’t sure how it worked, but they had figured out that their neighbour had an affair before his wife found out, that their aunt’s cat hadn’t run away but in fact been killed over by a driver who had proceeded to bury the animal rather than own up to it, and many other things besides.

Sherlock wasn’t the only one who profited from having a brother, though.

She had rarely seen her older son smile. He simply didn’t, or at least not very often, and she had always accepted that, instead of worrying that something must be wrong with him, as some of their relations. She could tell he was content, and if he didn’t want to show this by running around laughing, she didn’t mind.

But with Sherlock, he smiled.

Proudly, when his little brother had made the right deduction.

Somewhat exasperated when Sherlock demanded he play with him.

Annoyed, but satisfied when his little brother had yet again beaten him at Operation.

She was happy with the relationship her sons shared. But, at the same time, she wanted them to make other friends too. She knew they were different from other children. But that couldn’t be that much of a hindrance. They were good boys at heart. They could seem a little cold – especially Mycroft – but once the other children got to know them better, they would like them, she was sure of it.

Her older son would get to go out more, and her younger would no longer hide in his room and try to repress his sobs because he felt like an idiot. Violet had only found out about that by accident because Sherlock was too proud to admit that he felt his brother was smarter than him, and that therefore he must be an idiot to the rest of the World, but she had walked past his room and heard him cry and immediately rushed in.

He refused to tell her what had happened, at first, but a hug and a few kind words later he was openly crying in her arms because he was an idiot and would always be.

It was on this evening that she decided to finally introduce her sons to other children. Sherlock shouldn’t feel like an idiot, not when he was so much more intelligent than her and her husband and everyone else they knew, except Mycroft.

Siger agreed with her immediately when she mentioned that Sherlock had been crying, and on the next day, she took Sherlock to the playground while her husband made Mycroft accompany him to the park, where older children liked to play football.  

Sherlock sulked on the way to the playground.

“It will be fun” she tried to cheer him up, but he shook his head.

“Why do I need to play with other children?”

“It will be nice to have a few friends, Sherlock.”

“Mycroft doesn’t have any friends”. He said it with a conviction that once more proved that he looked up to his brother, that he wanted to follow his example, and Violet would have been touched if she hadn’t been worried about the matter-of-fact way he told her.

Neither of her sons spoke much about school – except to complain that it was “boring” and “not intellectually stimulating” – and Violet and Siger didn’t pry, but she had hoped that they weren’t isolated in their classes. Their teachers certainly hadn’t said anything about it, but they were awed by their intelligence, so she wasn’t surprised.

Violet bit her lip.

She didn’t want her sons to be lonely.

“Mummy?”

She looked down at the little boy who was holding her hand and looking at her with curious big eyes, eyes that held worry in them. He was worried he had hurt her.

Her heart melted. There was a big heart underneath that big brain, no matter what their relations whispered to each other behind their back at family parties. She smiled at him and he seemed to relax, if only slightly.

“It’s nothing, Sherlock. You don’t have to come back here if you don’t like it, alright? Just try. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to play with when Mycroft is busy?”

Sherlock thought about it for a moment and then nodded shyly.

Violet smiled and led her son to the playground.

As it turned out, she had overestimated other children’s capabilities of looking behind the intelligence and seeing Sherlock for the wonderful boy he was.

In her defence, though, she forgot now and then that her sons were extraordinary.

She had encouraged Sherlock to mingle with the other children and was talking to a neighbour while keeping an eye on her son when suddenly, a boy he had been staring at and finally spoken to started to cry and ran to his mother.

The woman stood up and, once the boy had uttered a few words and pointed, marched straight to Sherlock.

Violet was at his side a moment later, not even having excused herself from the neighbour.

“Ah” the woman said, her eyes narrowing. “He’s one of the Holmes boys. That explains it”.

“Explains what?” she asked, forcing herself to remain polite. Sherlock looked scared, and she would have enjoyed shouting at the woman, but she didn’t want to draw any more unwanted attention on her poor boy.

“Explains why he told Thomas that me and my husband would get a divorce. Look at him!”

Thomas was crying, and Violet would have comforted him, if his mother hadn’t been looking at Sherlock like he was a monster, a freak. And she wouldn’t allow that.

She kneeled down and looked her son in the eyes. Violet made sure to let him see that she wasn’t angry, and almost immediately, he didn’t seem quite so scared anymore.

“Sherlock – why did you tell Thomas that?”

“Because it’s true” he said quietly, his voice slightly higher than normal. “His clothes haven’t been ironed because his parents are fighting all the time and don’t look after him like they should, and his mother isn’t wearing her wedding ring – “

Unconsciously, Violet checked and saw that her son was right. Of course, that could mean a lot of things, but Sherlock with his limited experience couldn’t know that. She and Siger never took their rings off.

But, when she looked up at the woman’s face, she found that her son had been right.

Because she could read guilt there.

“He’s mean!” the other child cried. “Mum, tell him he’s wrong!”

She was torn between pity that Sherlock wasn’t, and anger that Thomas had called her son mean. She had been looking at Sherlock again in the moment, and she had seen him flinch.

“Mummy?” he asked, “Can we go home now? I don’t like it”.

“Because you are a freak” Thomas spat, and then, Violet saw something she hadn’t expected.

Sherlock suddenly schooled his features and said, in a voice that sounded older than his years, “I may be, but I don’t hear your mother telling me that I was wrong”.

Thomas stared at his mother, who hesitated.

It was enough to make the boy cry harder than ever, and Sherlock took Violet’s hand and dragged her away.

She let herself be.

Her boy didn’t deserve to be called a freak.

On the way home, she tried to comfort him.

“Not all children are like that, Sherlock.”

“But they all looked at me like I had done something wrong”.

She hadn’t paid attention to the other children, but she knew that if Sherlock said he’d seen it, he was right.

“They just need time to –“

“They didn’t see. Thomas didn’t even suspect. They are idiots” he stated. “Mummy, I don’t want to go back”.

She couldn’t say anything against that, not when he was so stubborn, so she didn’t.

At least Sherlock didn’t think he was an idiot anymore.

She wondered how Mycroft and Siger were doing, but when they arrived home, they were already back.

Siger was waiting for her with two cups of tea, and Sherlock happily ran off to talk to his brother.

She looked at her husband, and he sighed.

“I tried, Violet, but he refused to move. As he said, “I abhor exercise, especially pointless exercise. One boy asked him if he wanted to play, and he told him that “his feelings for his best friend were more than a crush, and he should reconsider his sexual orientation. If I hadn’t gone between them, he would have hit Mycroft”.

She told him what had happened at the playground, and Siger shook his head.

“Maybe they aren’t made for having friends.”

He sounded sad, and Violet answered, “I don’t think so. They just have to find the right people.”

She was sure there were some out there who could become friends to her sons. It would just take time. Nobody who was as extraordinary as these two would be lonely, she told herself. They were too good to be lonely.

Her husband smiled. “Let’s hope so. At least they have each other”.

She smiled back.

Later, she went to get a book out of her bedroom when she walked past Mycroft’s and heard Sherlock speak. She didn’t want to eavesdrop, not really; she just wanted to make sure her sons were fine.

Her younger one said, “I didn’t think they’d be like this. In school they never – “

“Do you ever interact with the children at school?”

Mycroft sounded just as composed as ever.

“No. I read in the breaks.”

“So do I. I have suspected for quite a while that trying to talk to them would be pointless, and so it has proved. Don’t worry about them, Sherlock. They are not worth it”.

“Alright” he replied softly before asking Mycroft to play Operation. Her older son accepted, while sounding a little bit annoyed (but not so much that Violet thought he didn’t want to play) and she walked on with a smile on her face.

Siger had been right.

They would always have each other.


End file.
